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Faces & Places
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| Franz Waxman |
If anything good can be said to have resulted from the cataclysmic rule of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, it would be the revitalization of Hollywood by German and Austrian Jewish émigré actors, directors and composers arriving in the 30s and 40s. Among those who stamped American cinema with timeless music was Franz Waxman (1906 - 1967), whose centennial will be marked on December 24. Waxman's scores include such wellknown classics as Bride of Frankenstein, Captains Courageous, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Woman of the Year, Rebecca, The Philadelphia Story, Sunset Boulevard, A Place in the Sun and Taras Bulba. All in all, Waxman's work in Hollywood — 144 films over the course of 32 years — brought him 12 Academy Award nominations and two Academy Awards.
As is the case with most film composers, Waxman's career path was not a straight line. He studied piano as a child and displayed great talent. Nonetheless, Waxman's father encouraged his son to take up banking as a career. Franz began working as a teller, saving his money for piano and composition lessons, eventually leaving his hometown to study music full time in Dresden, and ultimately, Berlin. He supported himself by playing jazz in nightclubs and, after exhibiting talent as an arranger, Waxman began receiving orchestration and conducting jobs for German film musicals. Frederick Hollander, who composed the Marlene Dietrich musical, The Blue Angel, hired Waxman to orchestrate and conduct the score. Waxman's abilities impressed the studio head enough to land him a film scoring assignment - Fritz Lang's 1933 film, Lilliom. That film was completed in Paris, because many associated with it, including Waxman, Lang and Hollander, had to flee the newlyinstalled Nazi regime. A year later, Waxman made his way to Hollywood and began to make film and cinema history.
John Waxman, who oversees his father's catalogue (and, via his company, Themes and Variations, represents numerous classic film and TV scores) sat down recently with Playback to discuss his father's film and non-film music, some of the activities surrounding the centennial, and what he believes to be his father's legacy for young music creators today: "If you are multi-talented and interested in composing, conducting and orchestrating, you can do it all. Franz Waxman was a perfect example of that."
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Gloria Swanson and William Holden in
Sunset Boulevard |
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| Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun |
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| Bride of Frankenstein's Elsa Lanchester and Boris Karloff |
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Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in
Woman of the Year |
Judging from the incredible variety of movies in your father's filmography, he was a natural film composer. Was there a particular genre he was best at?
My father was good at every genre. Bride of Frankenstein is different from The Philadelphia Story, as is Rebecca from Peyton Place. The best example is the year 1957 - he did Sayonara, Peyton Place, Spirit of St. Louis and Love in the Afternoon. A tremendous variety of music in films - the only person who does that today is John Williams - War of the Worlds, Memoirs of a Geisha, Star Wars VI, Munich - all in 2005.
Your Dad went into film scoring at a young age.
He studied music in Berlin; to support himself, he got a job playing at Frederick Hollander's Tingle Tangle Club - a nightclub that specialized in contemporary satire on politics and social life. Hollander was a director and prolific songwriter - he got a job for scoring The Blue Angel but didn't know how to orchestrate - he hired Franz to orchestrate the score for the movie. That got Franz into UFA, the equivalent to MGM of pre-war German films. Over the next three years, Waxman scored a half dozen German musicals. He owed his big break to Hollander.
Then your father went to America, like so many others who had no choice. Did the fact that there were so many European talents in Hollywood feed on itself in a way?
It did. I've been working on a PBS documentary, Exiles in Hollywood, which is about that - their influence on Hollywood films. There were so many writers, directors and composers who came over, among them Steiner, Korngold, Kaper, and Gold. Franz met a director, James Whale, who said he was looking all over the world for him because he saw Lilliom, which Franz had scored, and he asked if Franz would be interested in scoring a movie for him, The Bride of Frankenstein.
That's the mother of science fiction scores.
Danny Elfman once told me what my father, and Max Steiner, with King Kong, were doing at that time was writing music that was original because no one had composed in the science fiction genre before. The composers had their own creative freedom to see what worked best.
He worked on so many films. Did he have favorites among his scores?
He was really proud of the score for Bride of Frankenstein because it was his first Hollywood movie. Rebecca was a favorite for sure — he said it was an amazing picture. And Taras Bulba, a film about Russian history. Incidentally, Franz was the first American conductor to be invited to conduct orchestras in the Soviet Union. Taras Bulba was his twelfth and last Academy Award Nomination in 1962. Franz was actually supposed to do the score to Mutiny on the Bounty, and Bronislau Kaper was supposed to do Taras Bulba. Their schedules were conflicting, so they traded assignments.
Was there competition between these composers, or were they supportive of one another because there were so many films being made?
They were competitive on one level, but during the days of the studio system they would have lunch together everyday - for example, all the people who worked with my father at Fox studios: Newman, Herrmann, Raksin, Friedhofer, North, Powell and Mockridge.
When you start out with The Bride of Frankenstein, you're going to keep getting jobs.
Universal set my father up when was 29 years old as a music supervisor. A year and a half later he went to MGM to work solely as a composer. He was loaned to David O. Selznick for Rebecca in 1939. 1n 1943, he moved to Warner Bros. He became a free-lancer in 1949.
What do you think his place is in film music?
Waxman was one of six composers who were honored with postage stamps in 1999. Those six composers (Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann and Dimitri Tiomkin) were the musicians who created the soundtrack of our lives, and the movies they scored still have relevance and hold importance today. The vast catalog of these six composers is truly American music, even though some of them came from Europe. It didn't matter because they were writing music about world issues in America.
While working as the pianist in the Weintraub Syncopators, a Berlin-based jazz group, Waxman was exposed to the music of Bix Biederbecke back in the 1930s. So it isn't strange that the score to A Place In The Sun, which was my father's second Oscar in 1951, is one of the first jazz film scores.
In a chapter of Cameron Crowe's book, The Interviews with Billy Wilder, Crowe asked directors about lesser known Wilder films, and Steven Spielberg said his favorite was Spirit of Saint Louis, and he whistled the Waxman theme during the interview. The music has carried over to the next generation of directors and composers.
It's interesting that someone like your father would have time to write concert works on the side, like his oratorios, Joshua and Song of Terezin.
He consciously separated himself from Hollywood because he felt he needed space to write concert music. He also had a house in New York, which is where he wrote a lot of concert music too.
He had this whole other life in classical music. He founded, underwrote and, and for 20 years, directed the Los Angeles Music Festival. It was an acclaimed annual series of concerts that presented over 70 world, American and West Coast premieres of works by Mahler, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Britten, and Harris.
In this Waxman centennial year, there must be many related activities and events.
There will be a staged reading of Sunset Boulevard at the Hollywood Bowl, with John Mauceri conducting the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra on August 6. Turner Classic Movies will run a tribute in December; and The Museum of Modern Art will host a 23-picture retrospective and round table discussion during December 2006 and part of January 2007, the first time a composer is being honored by the Museum's Film Study Center. Richard Kaufman will be conducting Waxman Film Music Tribute concerts given by leading American orchestras, including the Florida Orchestra, Pacific Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Colorado Symphony and The Henry Mancini Institute. The first-ever recording of his oratorio, Joshua, will be released this summer on Deutsche Grammophon. Other releases are in the works, as well, including the cabaret songs from his Berlin period.
I'd like to also add that September 9th will mark the 60th anniversary of the world premiere at Carnegie Hall by Jascha Heifetz of one of my father's most popular works - the Carmen Fantasie for Violin and Orchestra. I am delighted that a new generation of violinists has rediscovered the piece.
— Jim Steinblatt
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